Our Elf-xecutive Director (and cool, free things)

Merry Christmas everybody.

I am compelled to blog today as a meme is upon us. For the past two days I have been receiving and sending multiple 'elf yourself' elves. For those who haven't seen this cool little online tool yet, it's at the Office Max website...it was originally sent to me by a friend in the states and within 24 hours everyone was doing it and talking about it. Within seconds it allows you to turn anyone you've got a jpg of...kids, friends, bosses, Osama Bin Laden for that matter, into a good time holiday guy or gal.

It's incredibly charming, ridiculously easy to use, and for our purposes raises questions about low barrier technology, pricing models, and what it takes to get the public 'on board' with new media activities.

Here's a sample, involving someone we all know and love, and trust me, it's worth clicking or pasting the URL into your browser if you must.

http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=923bbe80002f8ed5c1c01f7G06122420

Just imagine the impact this type of application would have if on mobile devices, if it was this easy to use (it takes less than 30 seconds to create) and was free of charge. Obviously it cost Office Max, the sponsors of the site, to make this feature available to people, but it now seems to be accepted that making these kinds of things available on the web is part of the cost of doing business and goes a long way in building brand and goodwill.

Feel free to hit 'create your own' at the end and see how dead easy it is to do just that. what formerly required photoshop now has a built in online tool that even a child can use. The record your own voice message, which involves dialing a 1-866 # and entering a unique 8 digit code that is generated for every elf sent is also simply simple simple and the whole thing knocks people out with delight and the next thing you know they're sending a dozen more out.

I'm looking to the technorcrats out there (Jim U, are you in the house?) to explain the IVR functionality here. It's likely  not that complicated, but talk about high impact. And how expensive could it be if it's free to the user?

Which brings me to the larger point...what will it take to get these types of self-promoting, truly viral, activities out there on mobile platforms? I believe this is what is will need to happen to get the sort of uptake all of us need to create sustainable businesses out of our various endeavours. I recall a time about a dozen years ago when there was talk about charging for email....making it 2 to 3 cents per email...and I think that there may have even been a free maximum on services such as Compuserve and Prodigy, Genie, after which you actually were charged a fee for emails. But emails were primarily either for business communication at that time, or a tool used by academics or by people involved in community building projects such as The Well, based in, of course the Bay area. If someone's memory is crisper than mine on this one please remind me of how, back then, the industry got beyond dinging people for every email sent; as of course, what made email the killer app was that people started using it for non-business purposes....to track down people they hadn't seen in decades (this happened to me personally on a number of occasions and has led to a rekindling of several old friendships), to communicate via broadcast mails (ie one to many) and eventually, once the technology had become totally embedded, to send micro-packets of information...things not worthy of a phone call or personal visit.

As a number of bloggers here have been pointing out (Jim Udall & Nick Simon in particular) we have significant obstacles in the form of infrastructure fees, largely imposed by the carriers (and the companies who are beholden to them, such as SMS aggregators, for example). It is clear from the runaway success of sites such as flickr and wikipedia that people want to participate , that they are interested in 'by the people/of the people' content; so again our challenge is to create parallel mobile situations where doing so is easy, free (not sure if cheap is even enough), and provides a form of gratification to the creator.

At our project leaders meeting last week David asked us to come up with a list of our top 10 "pain points" so that our partners at Bell can work with us to address them. What we are doing is still so ahead of market demands that to a carrier such as Bell, what we are all dealing with everyday is new information to them...and that is why we're doing it. Without going through the pain of the pioneer how else would these issue become so crystal clear?

RIP James Brown and happy holidays to all of you from the metroCode crew,

Leora